Curry Barker Is Horror’s Most Exciting New Voice

Not long ago, Curry Barker was posting sketch comedy videos on YouTube under the brand “That’s A Bad Idea.” Now he has a billboard next to his car wash, a $15 million Focus Features deal, and Jason Blum in his corner. At 26 years old, Barker is having a moment — and if Obsession‘s opening weekend is any indication, it’s only getting started.

The supernatural horror film, which Barker wrote and directed, earned $2.6 million in Thursday previews and Wednesday early access screenings alone — a striking number for a movie that cost just $1 million to make. It’s playing in 2,542 locations across North America, including 435 large-format and premium screens. And it arrives with a rare 95% score on Rotten Tomatoes from both critics and audiences, the kind of double approval that studios dream about.

Obsession centers on Bear (Michael Johnston), a shy, 20-something music store employee who has been quietly in love with his childhood friend Nikki (Inde Navarrette) for years. When he can’t bring himself to just tell her how he feels, he cracks open a vintage “One Wish Willow” toy — an ’80s novelty item that promises to grant one wish — and uses it to wish that Nikki would love him more than anyone in the world. She does. Immediately. Terrifyingly. What follows is 108 minutes of possession, obsession, jealousy, and gore, as Nikki transforms into a self-destructive, dangerously violent version of herself, incapable of letting Bear go.

“We wanted it to feel grounded, and we wanted to really lean into, ‘OK, magic is real in this world, fine. Let’s accept that, let’s move on,’” Barker explained. “And now, what you’re left with is a pretty tragic story about a man and a woman, and leaning into the realism of that was really important to me.”

At its core, the film is about consent and the cost of avoiding an uncomfortable conversation. Bear’s inability to simply tell Nikki how he feels is what sets everything in motion — and the movie doesn’t let him off the hook for it. Navarrette’s performance walks a razor’s edge, playing Nikki as both a villain and a victim, with the real Nikki occasionally breaking through her possessed state in tortured, horrified outbursts. It’s the kind of dual performance that earns a star a reputation, and reviews have already started calling her a scream queen in the making.

From YouTube Sketches to TIFF Bidding Wars

Barker’s path to this moment is genuinely unlike most directors working today. He and his longtime creative partner — and Obsession co-star — Cooper Tomlinson met in film school, dropped out together, and started making content online. Their sketch comedy brand “That’s A Bad Idea” built them a real audience. Then Barker made Milk & Serial, an $800 found-footage serial killer film that he released for free on YouTube. It went viral. Hollywood noticed.

He signed with UTA. Buyers came calling. And when Obsession premiered at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival, it sparked a full-on bidding war — Focus Features beat out both Neon and A24 to acquire it for around $15 million, with Universal Pictures coming aboard to handle international distribution.

“My agent looked at me after TIFF — this is someone who’s had clients that have made it and who knows what this industry is like — saying to me, ‘Your life is never going to be the same. Your life just changed,’” Barker recalled. “I was hearing him and taking that in, but also being, like, we’ll see. It’s too much for a human to comprehend at that time.”

The pinch-me moment came later, walking down a street and seeing an Obsession billboard next to the car wash he always uses.

Focus leaned into an inventive marketing campaign that matched the film’s eerie tone. Replica One Wish Willow toys sold out within hours of going on sale. An in-world commercial for the toy has racked up more than 4.4 million views on YouTube. And fans across Los Angeles and New York have been encountering cryptic billboards featuring Nikki’s obsessive handwriting alongside a phone number — call it, and you’ll find yourself on the receiving end of Nikki’s increasingly unsettling texts, voice notes, and special deliveries.

The Scene That Almost Got an NC-17

The film’s most talked-about sequence involves Nikki killing Bear’s female co-worker — slamming her head into a steering wheel in a jealous rage — and in its original cut, it was significantly more extreme. The MPAA pushed back, and Barker had to reduce the number of head impacts to avoid an NC-17 rating.

“I was so upset about that at first and scared that it was going to change the integrity of the scene,” he said. “I was scared to touch it, because I had already seen the reaction at TIFF. I didn’t want to mess up whatever good is happening here. But it was fine. I think the integrity of the scene is still there.”

He’s already dreaming about a director’s cut that restores it — along with an alternate ending and a cut monologue from Nikki at the car where she talks about love and romance. “Let this movie breathe just a little bit more,” he said. “It would be fun to experiment and do a new cut of it.”

That alternate ending is its own conversation. In the script, Nikki wakes up from her possession with a gun already in her mouth. She looks around, sees Bear, realizes for the first time in a while that she has control over herself — and then puts the gun back in her mouth and ends her life, unable to live with the horror of what she’s done. Barker ultimately decided against it.

“We just decided that it was more brutal if she stays alive,” he said simply.

Jason Blum’s Stamp of Approval

One of the more striking elements of Barker’s rise is the support he’s received from Jason Blum, the producer behind the Halloween franchise, Get Out, and the entire Blumhouse empire. Blum serves as an executive producer on Obsession and has publicly described Barker as one of the most exciting emerging voices in horror.

Barker said the support has been “awesome” and made clear it isn’t a one-time thing. The two are already deep into their next collaboration — Blumhouse’s Anything But Ghosts, which Barker just finished shooting alongside Atomic Monster and Spooky Pictures.

The film stars Aaron Paul and Bryce Dallas Howard as con artists who call themselves ghost hunters but are, as Barker puts it, “glorified magicians” who don’t actually believe in ghosts. Until, presumably, they have to. Barker and Tomlinson also star in the film — a first for both of them at this scale.

“I was nervous at first, because I have very specific ideas of what the scene looks like for me,” Barker admitted about directing Paul and Howard. “But my dad said, ‘They want to be directed and you’re going to let them down if you don’t give them direction.’ That really meant a lot to me.” He added that both actors were “literally both the most sweet people I’ve ever met in Hollywood.”

Texas Chainsaw and What Comes After

Beyond Anything But Ghosts, Barker is also attached to direct A24’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre — a project he’s been openly excited about since A24 acquired the rights to the franchise. His pitch for it sounds exactly like what you’d hope: grounded, brutal, and character-first.

“It’s gonna be grounded, brutal, raw. It should be very, very uncomfortable,” he said. “I want to make you care about the characters that we’re on the journey with. Just like Bear, Nikki and Sarah are characters that you never knew before — I mean, we all know Leatherface and the Sawyers — but what are the characters that I can invent that we can grow to care about? If they do die brutally, we’ll actually be sad that they died.”

And if all that weren’t enough, Barker is also quietly entertaining the idea of returning to the world of Obsession. He’s acknowledged, with good humor, that the One Wish Willow’s rules don’t entirely hold up to scrutiny — “if the One Wish Willow actually works, which it does in this lore, and people are just making wishes left and right, there would be some crazy — like, dragons would exist” — but that hasn’t stopped him from thinking about what comes next.

“I obviously have a couple more things that I’m excited about next, but I do see Obsession 2, maybe,” he told Total Film. “Or even what really is exciting to me is maybe an anthology, like a one-hour episode. Each episode is a different wish that goes completely off the rails. Maybe I’ll direct the pilot with the same DP, and you could invite other filmmakers to kind of give their spin at it. That would be really cool.”

For a filmmaker who was posting YouTube sketches just a few years ago, Curry Barker is now operating at a level most directors spend decades trying to reach. And from everything he’s said about Texas Chainsaw, Anything But Ghosts, and whatever version of Obsession he eventually gets to make without anyone telling him to pull back — he’s just getting warmed up.

Obsession is in theaters now.